This is what it looks like. It essentially disables cat protect and substitutes higher knock advance limits when on a chassis dyno. This scared the crap out of me the first time I experienced it because I had carefully tuned my timing and limited knock advance to 2 deg and then watched it go to 6 on the dyno.
I think this may only be in the Whipple cals where have "race mode" which changes lambda and spark when it detects it is on a dyno, which is why the advertised hp numbers don't necessarily match the mph at the track.This is what it looks like. It essentially disables cat protect and substitutes higher knock advance limits when on a chassis dyno. This scared the crap out of me the first time I experienced it because I had carefully tuned my timing and limited knock advance to 2 deg and then watched it go to 6 on the dyno.
So are we to conclude that unplugging the dyno plug will result in the same tune adjustments? Seems that there are two parts to this, the elimination of the pesky steering and advance trac stuff, but then seems like there's output implications.
No, I believe that dyno mode, a Ford OEM function, works the same as unplugging the ABS plug under the hood except it's activated and deactivated by a series of driver action. Nothing happens to the tune.
Would there be any REASONABLE explanation? Cause it smells an awful lot like a marketing gimmick to pump dyno numbers.
Is it weird that I kinda want to see an AI vs AI battle here?
Kinda fascinating that nobody has noticed this before. No wonder people get such high dyno numbers with these cars. I thought my car was sub par or something for barely cracking 400 on the dyno, but I didn't know about the plug at that time and I got the typical ABS freakout.
Whipple Tune or Aftermarket?
It is absolutely possible and as a company I'd love to work with them to provide it. Getting the right contacts and making a business case to do so is the hard part. I assume enough people will buy the stock kit and be happy with it that it doesn't make business sense for them to go any further (unless people start paying 15k+ for a kit).
The return on investment reverse engineering these new ECUs is awful, most people do it as a challenge or just to show off. You could potentially drop a million dollars with no result. You have to sell a lot of credits for that to make sense. I think if people are willing to start accepting a premium price for a tune (eg > $1k) this would encourage development. Gone are the days of $300 tunes.
There are more than you think of these people, however it is FAR more lucrative to do the same thing in other industries, eg work as a contractor NSA (any cyber team in the five eyes group) or privately doing bug bounties, or grey hat work for cyber security companies.
